Laura Vanderkam - Writer, Author, Speaker » Entrepreneurshiphttp://lauravanderkam.com
Laura Vanderkam writes about time management, career, work, and family in her books, I Know How She Does It, 168 Hours and What the Most Successful People Do.Sun, 02 Aug 2015 15:16:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.6What is my time worth?http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/07/time-worth/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/07/time-worth/#commentsThu, 23 Jul 2015 07:52:08 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=6087read more »]]>I always encourage people to think about the value of their time. But actually putting a dollar value on it? That’s complicated.

That was my take-away after several readers sent me Sue Shellenbarger’s WSJ article on “Do You Know What Your Time Is Really Worth?” The article had a link to an online tool called ClearerThinking that asks a series of questions about your salary and work habits, and then guides you through thought experiments to figure out how you value your time.

I put in that I work about 45 hours during the weeks I work, but I only work about 48 weeks per year (2160). From tracking my time lately, I see that 42 hours is my long-term rolling average, so that comes out about right. I figured roughly what I earn per hour (let’s call this X) and then the tool calculated that I valued my leisure time at a rate that was 60 percent higher than X. It warmed my economic-minded heart to find out I was more consistent and rational in my answers than the majority of survey-takers, but still, the recommendation was clear: I either need to ask for a raise, or I need to start working less.

I am not interested in the latter. Indeed, I’ve been trying to figure out how to work more. I’d be happy to earn more, but I also know I’m not optimizing my income. I know how to earn more money, and I’m not doing those things.

So what’s going on? Well, I’m irrational like all humans are irrational, but there are complicating factors that go into deciding what my time is worth, and these factors may affect others’ calculations too.

Factor 1 – my husband also earns money. Therefore I probably make some decisions on what my time is worth based on total household income and total time available, not just mine. I imagine lots of couples do this; a non-working party in a high-income household generally doesn’t value his/her time at zero. This person is often willing to pay for some childcare, for instance, or a cleaning service.

Factor 2 – if earning lots of money were my primary motivation, I went into the wrong line of work. I chose writing because I really enjoy it, and I chose the version of writing I do (primarily book writing and essay writing) because it’s what I like best. I’m thrilled to get paid pretty well for something a lot of people do for free. I find it becomes harder to put a rational dollar value on work time when you know that if you had a different job, you’d be doing your current day job as a hobby on nights and weekends. I try!

Factor 3 – happy time and time not spent working are not the same things. While I know that I have a reasonable amount of leisure time (even “me time” per yesterday’s post), an hour not spent working could be devoted to different things, which I value differently. A lovely trail run on a gorgeous day is one thing. So is a nice one-on-one excursion with a happy child, or a date night dinner. An hour on a rainy Saturday with bickering children is another thing entirely. I imagine some parents who thought they could get away with it have claimed to their spouses that “I have to get caught up on work!” in that scenario.

Factor 4 – it’s hard to adopt assumptions in thought exercises. For instance, in the ClearerThinking tool, you were asked to say how long you’d wait in line for a $100 gift certificate. You’re allowed to have an electronic device, so it’s neutral and not unpleasant, and so in theory, I should be willing to wait at least an hour, but I’m not. I hate lines. Irrationally! I put 20 minutes, but even that might be stretching it.

Factor 5 – how easily do time and money convert to each other? I don’t get tripped up on this one as much, but a lot of people do. I know that an additional quantity of my time could be turned into money relatively easily. That’s one of the upsides of self-employment. When people are salaried, working an additional hour doesn’t always translate so clearly into extra cash. In the long term, I think it often does, and I encourage people to think about that when making decisions (especially childcare decisions) but the path isn’t so straightforward.

When you think about what you earn per hour, and how you’d value your leisure time, how do these things compare? Would you have to be paid more than your current hourly rate to work additional hours?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/07/time-worth/feed/23My advice for a first-time book author, and not about the writing parthttp://lauravanderkam.com/2015/03/advice-first-time-book-author-writing-part/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/03/advice-first-time-book-author-writing-part/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 21:14:41 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=5630read more »]]>Dear first-time author:

Congrats on your book contract! This is a major accomplishment. You’re no doubt nervous about writing a 75,000 word manuscript over the next 6-9 months, and you’ll get all kinds of advice on that.

This post is about the other part. The marketing part. Between now and when your book comes out 18 months from now, you will need to learn how to launch a product and get it into the hands of the target market.

Did I say “product”? I did! Oh, I know it’s fashionable, as a writer, to roll one’s eyes about platform. If you’re feeling self-indulgent or literary, you might bat off another writer’s question about this during a panel discussion with a drawl that you find this topic so terribly boring.* Can’t you just write?

Sure you can just write. But unless you get spectacularly lucky, you risk no one buying your book. And if no one buys your book, or if people buy your book but not with enough velocity to match expectations, you will not get to write another one. Whereas if you do well on building excitement and reach (which is basically what platform amounts to), you will wind up with a situation like I saw the other night when I went to Gretchen Rubin’s event with the Princeton Chamber of Commerce. (My brother lives in Princeton, so I got to bring the kids to play with cousins, and I went and met the business women of Princeton at the reception beforehand. Much fun!) There was someone who’d flown in from Las Vegas to see her and talked about being a “super fan.” Who wouldn’t want super fans? So even if you find this topic boring, let’s hedge our bets.

Marketing comes down to finding the right people, and getting them so excited about your product that they fly from Las Vegas to see you.

First, let’s look at the packaging of the product itself. Some titles spark a lot more desire (“demand” in economic speak) than others. You want a title that does the heavy lifting for you. “The 4-Hour Workweek” is more inspiring than, say, Build Passive Income By Selling Supplements Online. In my own personal experience, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast moves more product than Use Your Mornings Well. Do whatever it takes to get this right. If you have to explain what the book is about, you’re lost.

Second, know the limits of traditional media. Media can do wonderful things in certain forms. Big hits — the major morning TV shows, the WSJ Review section, NPR, major stories in the New York Times — will intrigue millions of potential readers. The tricky part of this, though, is that most people don’t buy books. They will see you on a talk show, or read you quoted in an article, and then go about their lives. (For an incredibly honest account of this, read Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Executive Presence. She writes about how her 2002 book Creating a Life was all over the media, and yet it didn’t sell as well as expected. Indeed, it was the subject of a major New York Times story about how it wasn’t selling. It took her a while, and much tenacity, to rebuild her career from that fall-out).

What does work? Personal recommendations are important, which is one of the big reasons Oprah’s book club was what it was. It wasn’t just that the author was on TV. It was that a trusted source assured people that they would love the book. If a friend tells me I’ve got to try something, more often than not I do. That’s why blogs are great for spreading the word about a book. If you’ve got blogger friends, they’ll offer to help you. Ask if they liked the book and would recommend it. If so, ask them to write this on their blogs. Often, this happens organically. A blogger who really likes your book will hopefully share this with her readers. But not all writers know to ask for this.

Guaranteed book sales are also helpful. It can take a huge media hit to sell a few hundred books. A conference organizer who puts your book in all attendees’ swag bags will generate that sale through one contact.

You get to know these influentials as you would anyone else: networking, ideally by being generous and interesting, and hopefully making people want to be part of your projects in the future. You should be especially kind when you can to other book authors. It costs you nothing to mention their books on social media. You’ll be thankful when people likewise draw attention to your book upon its launch.

You also need to build your own tribe. This is a hard, long, process, but it feels much more authentic than many other parts of marketing. People will buy your book because they want to read you. This is one of many reasons to blog. I know that blogging takes time and energy, but please spare me the snit about how you don’t want to give away your content for free. If you’re a writer, you should be writing a lot. Blogging lets you try out ideas and hone them over time. This is not a zero sum game. It gives you a home on the internet. It helps people get to know you so they want to learn what you have to say. Smart authors even use their blogs to network with other influentials; check out how Susie Orman Schnall has been building buzz for her novel The Balance Project by interviewing 70 women about their lives over at her site. Now the 70 of us will likely mention her book (out April 28th — see what I just did?)

That said, some people spend less time reading blogs than others. You should do what you can to capture email addresses so you can reach occasional readers and non blog readers too. A free ebook, a time sheet. Some people have this down to a science. At Gretchen Rubin’s talk the other night, she passed around a notepad where people could write down their email addresses. They’re there, she’s there. Yeah, some are super fans, but others are random Princeton people whose companies bought tickets because they support all chamber of commerce events. Why not make that relationship long-term?

Marketing won’t sell a crappy book. You might get a swift start out of the gate. Indeed, there are people who buy their way onto bestseller lists with the hope that this will establish them as thought leaders and get the ball rolling. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. What I do know is that many a good book has died for lack of attention. After all your hard work, you don’t want this to happen to you.

In other news: This is probably a good opportunity to warn regular blog readers that this blog might become a bit more self-promotional over the next few two months in the lead up to the launch of I Know How She Does It. There might even be a pop-up screen, but I will do my best to make sure you only see it once.

* seriously, this happened.

Photo: It is completely awesome to see your book in airport book stores.

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/03/advice-first-time-book-author-writing-part/feed/5Reader question: When should I turn down well-paying work?http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/01/reader-question-turn-well-paying-work/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/01/reader-question-turn-well-paying-work/#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2015 14:54:50 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=5279read more »]]>Today’s reader question comes from a woman I’ll call Amy. She works full time (35-40 hours/week) from home as a contractor to major tech companies. She also runs a creative business on the side. She devotes about 5 hours a week to that. She was recently approached about doing a bigger digital creative project that would be something new for her, but fits with the long-term mission of her creative business. Even better: this new digital project would pay the same rate as her biggest day gig client.

So what’s the catch? Well, it’s even more hours, and Amy has young kids. She has only recently scaled the contracting business up to full time, and is still figuring out how to make that more intense schedule work. So her question: should she say yes or no?

This question of when to accept or turn down work is one any free agent type eventually faces. There are obvious reasons to turn something down: the pay is lousy, or it’s decent, but the project in question would make you hate your life. Those aren’t tricky decisions to make.

But what if the pay is good? What if the project sounds intriguing?

I always struggle with this myself. When you run your own business you eat what you kill. You’re always somewhat worried that the herd of wild game will move on and you’ll be left with nothing to roast on the campfire. When someone is offering you a project that you didn’t have to hunt for, and it looks like a nice fattened beast, it is extraordinarily difficult to remember that, you know, you do have a lot of beasts already stacked up in the cave. And it’s pretty hard to eat all of them.

In Amy’s case, she didn’t need the money. Since she’d recently scaled up the main business, she was already more flush with income than she’d been in the recent past.

So I said her answer should hinge on two questions. The first was how excited she was about the project. When she pictured herself doing it, did she feel happy? Did she think she would learn something new and valuable? Would she find it interesting for its own sake, or would she be constantly trying to minimize time spent on it?

The second question was whether she could get her head around the extra hours. Maybe the answer is no. If the transition to full-time work was already rocky, then she could decide now was not the time. But if the answer to question #1 was that she was really interested, then there might be a way to keep the extra hours in perspective. She could add up a time estimate for the project, figure out how long she was willing to work near peak capacity, and parcel out the hours equally over that number of weeks. If this project would require an extra 8 hours per week, she could perhaps get extra childcare one evening, and ask her husband to cover a weekend shift.

She could also examine the hours she was already devoting to her creative business. Could anything be put on hold for a while?

She could also enlist help. While it’s often hard to capture efficiencies with a temp assistant during a short period of time, she could try this approach. She could spend an hour or two figuring out what she needed to do, and what less-skilled work she could farm out. If the project went smashingly well, and looked like a direction she wanted to take her business, she’d be a step ahead on having a team to tackle it.

All of this would be an experiment, but likely the project would only take a few weeks, so it wouldn’t be an eternal thing. At the end, she could look back at how it had gone. If the experience made her think “never again” then she’d know her work limit. But if it went all right, she’d know that she could take on intriguing extra projects when she wanted to, and possibly view the extra creative work as an option if she ever wanted to scale down the tech work.

If you’re in the free agent camp, how do you evaluate what projects to take on? Are you willing to scale up your hours at times for something interesting or well-paying?

Photo: Unrelated to this post. My second grader’s teacher baked “Monster muffins” with spinach, and my kid tried them and liked them. So he came home with the recipe and I baked them last night. The green was a bit much for the 5-year-old, but the 3-year-old ate most of one (the chocolate chips on top helped). The 7-year-old ate several. I guess we’ve added a vegetable into the rotation!

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2015/01/reader-question-turn-well-paying-work/feed/9I can. But should I?http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/09/can-i/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/09/can-i/#commentsMon, 29 Sep 2014 01:08:59 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=4950read more »]]>I work for myself and have for years. I love having control of my time. To be sure, it would be mistake to see this as a stark choice; one thing I’ve learned from the Mosaic Project is that plenty of people with conventional jobs have reasonable control over their time too. Nonetheless, with my set-up, the stakes to choose something personal rather than work-related are probably smaller in any individual decision. But that leads to a different problem. Because I can do things during the day, and can often move work from one day to another, or one week to another, each decision to say yes or no seems more fraught.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with this recently. September has been a month of transition: starting schools, a new childcare situation and schedule, new sports routines and the like. All the expectations of previous years have been re-set. As one example, I now do the morning routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Last year, I didn’t. That means (among other things) I go outside and wait for the bus with my 7-year-old. But he asks close to every other day (when we have childcare) if I’ll be coming out, and can I come out, and so forth. While I enjoy chatting with him about his day, so I am happy to do it twice a week, five times a week is a different matter. It’s an uncertain chunk of time during what is often a productive hour for me. I either need to say no and deal with the whining, or else I do it, and feel like these 3 days of the week are chopped up. Are there consequences? Not immediately, I suppose. But over the long run, I can’t do everything I could do without undermining my professional goals too.

If I had an 8:30 a.m. staff meeting in an office, I could answer semi-truthfully that I “can’t” do it. I can do it — though I also know I can accomplish very productive things in that window, possibly doing more than some chunk of meetings accomplish.

My husband tried to be philosophical about this with me: “It’s like a country western song! Eventually he’ll be too embarrassed to be seen out waiting for the bus with you! Aren’t you lucky that you get to be home during this time when he wants to be with you?” Which is fine, except that this country western song could apply equally to both of us. We both have control of our time. He seems to have managed the expectations differently.

All of this is part of transition, though, and I’m sure at some point we’ll reach an accommodation where each individual decision is not fraught. My son may figure out that I come out with him twice a week and don’t three times a week, and that’s just the way we do things. In the interim, though, I’ve become a bit more amenable to 8 a.m. calls. They give me specific reasons to stick with the 2x on, 3x off schedule.

If you have a flexible schedule, how do you decide what you’ll do and what you won’t?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/09/can-i/feed/13The Baby-sitters Club, and how we figure out what people want to readhttp://lauravanderkam.com/2014/05/baby-sitters-club-figure-people-read/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/05/baby-sitters-club-figure-people-read/#commentsTue, 20 May 2014 12:30:52 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=4600read more »]]>I interviewed a few people from Macmillan last week for a piece I’m writing on crowdsourcing. One of those people was Jean Feiwel, who lists on her bio that working with Ann M. Martin years ago while she was at Scholastic to create The Baby-sitters Club was “one of my proudest accomplishments.”

Since we were talking about whether publishers know what readers want, I had to ask her about this. The Baby-sitters Club was one of the hottest series of all time. I’m guessing many blog readers here can recite the names of the girls in the club (Kristy! Mary Anne! Claudia! etc.) and their attributes, like Mallory having 7 siblings, Stacey having diabetes, and so forth. Millions of girls (myself included) spent babysitting money on these books. Did they know that those would sell when the series started? How did that happen?

Feiwel reminded me that Scholastic has always put out their catalog and distributed it to children. You’ve probably gotten these fliers with kids’ books home from school. Anyway, for a while, they were selling a book called something like “Jenny’s Babysitting Job.” Feiwel told me it wasn’t prominently featured, and it was a very small little square in the catalog. And it has a forgettable title. But “every time the editor put it on the list it was one of the highest selling books.” Looking at that, Feiwel wondered if maybe there wasn’t a sizable audience of girls interested in this way they were making money.

So she worked with Ann M. Martin, a writer who had a reputation for “a great sense of character,” to hash out the start of a series. It would be about a club of sitters. Scholastic commissioned 4 books. The concept took a little time to catch on — remember, this is pre-social media — but by book 3 or so, the slim little volumes of babysitting adventures were flying off shelves. The whole series and its spin-offs sold about 176 million copies. I well remember staying up late when I spent the night at the house of a friend who owned about 88 million of these books, reading through them.

As I wrote in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, I think that Kristy’s Great Idea was one of the best business concepts of the 1980s. Though, alas, teenage babysitting has declined for reasons that I well understand. Since I’m often hiring sitters because I need to do something and my husband is out of town, I need ones who can drive. I’m not going to wake up all 3 kids to drive her home.

But anyway, I thought this was an interesting insight into how people used feedback from customers before it was instantly available. It reminds me of some of the direct-mail fundraising innovations in the 1970s or so, when political candidates learned to test different messages and see which inspired the most donations.

Did you read The Baby-sitter’s Club books? Who was your favorite character?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/05/baby-sitters-club-figure-people-read/feed/37How do I start a business when I’ve got a bundle of kids around here?http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/05/start-business-bundle-kids-here/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/05/start-business-bundle-kids-here/#commentsThu, 08 May 2014 02:04:26 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=4575read more »]]>In the post earlier this week on The Nesting Place, a few comments raised the question of how to start a business when you don’t have the cash for childcare. You hope the business will eventually bring in enough to pay for childcare, a great house, trips to Tahiti, retirement, innovative philanthropic work, etc., but it probably won’t right away. It is the rare person who manages to start a business and sell it to Amazon for $200 million like a year later.

Anyway, it turns out that many entrepreneurs who happen to have kids aren’t paying for full-time childcare. A Manta survey of women small business owners, done for Mother’s Day, found that 66 percent did not have nannies or babysitters supporting them on a daily basis. In some cases, that’s because their kids are 17 years old. In others, it’s likely because the kids are in school most of the day. I’m certainly seeing Mosaic logs from women who do most of their core work between the 7:30 bus pick up and the 3:00 drop-off. Add in a few after school activities and night/weekend work and you can hit 45 hours/week.

But while that 66 percent figure could be encouraging, here’s something you need to know: building a business takes time. It takes hours. Here’s something else you should know: With some modern businesses, being seen as a mom just running a blog is as much marketing as anything else. People have teams of employees. And if our entrepreneur has young kids, it’s likely that one of those employees is watching the kids some chunk of the time so mom can work.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with paying people to watch your kids so you can engage in economically productive activities. As a WFH type, I certainly think there are upsides of having the kids in the same place as you. I got to celebrate a potty success the other day, and I get hugs after school and all that. But I don’t view myself as in a fundamentally different category than someone working a corporate job, and I wish everyone would be honest about their childcare arrangements. I have coverage from 8-5:15 M-F. I usually have coverage at least one evening a week too. That is what my life and my professional goals require.

So what if you don’t have regular childcare coverage? What if you have been home with your kids, and need or want to start a business, both for your professional fulfillment and to shoulder your share of supporting the family financially?

People write to me about the chicken-and-egg problem. Childcare delivers time. You need time to grow your business. Growing your business will generate cash. However, childcare requires cash right now. How can you grow your business when you don’t have start-up capital, and so childcare seems unaffordable?

Instead of looking to online entrepreneurs who are being coy about their own childcare arrangements, and feeling inferior because you think they’re building a business “without” childcare, it’s more helpful to ask a few questions: First, what’s triggering the urge to start the business? If it’s because the former primary breadwinner is now out of work, that’s at least partially solved your problem. Parents can split the 8-6 workday, each taking 5 hours apiece with the kids, and each devoting 5 hours per day to their professional development. That still leaves time for family breakfast and dinner, while everyone’s getting at least 25 hours a week for job searching or business building (to say nothing of night and weekend time that’s also available).

Second, is childcare really unaffordable? A key thing here is that many people don’t like the idea of paying for childcare because they don’t like the idea of childcare in the first place. So it’s always seen as optional. And yet in our Nesting Place story, this family took on debt so the husband could buy into a franchise and get the equipment necessary for it. Investing in his business was fine. That could be a family goal. So I’d say investing in mom’s business can be a family goal too. Even committing to paying for just a few months of childcare can give you the runway to launch, while putting a cap on cash outflow. Not all businesses will generate cash in 6 months, but you can structure your business to make that a top priority.

But let’s say you are committed to no debt. I have seen women manage to start certain sorts of businesses during after work hours. If you don’t have clients who expect to see your face during the work day, and who won’t call and expect quiet at 2 p.m., it can work. The usual approach is that your partner works a regular job, and commits to coming home by 5:30 or 6. You could have family dinner together if you like, and then he covers the evening shift several day a week while you work. Working from 6:30-10:30, or 6:30-11:30 if you can swing it will give you quite a few hours, especially if you then add in weekend work when your partner can cover too. There is one woman in the Mosaic project who’s doing the bulk of her work between 7:30-11:30 at night, and on weekends. It cuts into sleep, and she’s only planning on doing this for a little bit longer until the youngest is in school, but it is an option.

Another option is to combine the above with a few hours of paid care during typical working hours. You might be able to find a part-time sitter to come from 9 a.m. -1 p.m. 2-3 days per week. That would let you meet with clients, do phone calls, etc. while doing other work from 6-10 at night a few days per week. Paying for 8 hours of care is less expensive than paying for 40 hours of care, though this can introduce its own problems. Sometimes people don’t treat 8 hour/week jobs with the seriousness they’d treat 40/hour week jobs. If you’re supposed to meet a client and your sitter calls to cancel, this will make it just as difficult to grow your business as if you didn’t have childcare in the first place. But it’s a possibility too. I’ve heard of homeschooling families hiring mother’s helpers from other homeschooling families in their neighborhoods as a way to get some childcare and help those teens earn some cash. College students can work, or neighborhood retirees, or another mom in the area.

This last concept of tapping community is worth exploring for non-paid care too. Is there another family nearby that you know and trust and that is in a similar situation? Maybe you trade off care — each family takes 2 days per week, and this creates time to work without cash outflow (technically this is a barter that you are supposed to report as income, but I’m guessing this is one of the most flouted IRS rules out there). Could you start a co-op? Maybe you have a neighbor who’s usually around and doesn’t mind having the kids dropped off last minute if you do need to meet a client. This sort of back up can lessen the pain associated with part-time sitting.

Finally, one last option is just to be patient. You can think of your business as being in the “incubation” stage for a few years, depending on the age of your youngest kid (as long as you don’t keep having babies — but that’s a different matter). You experiment with things and think about it a lot, and figure out your target market, and learn all about the market, knowing that you intend to hit the ground running as soon as the kids are old enough to be in school, or entertain themselves, or whatever you intend to do with them.

Do you run a business without regular childcare? How do you make that work?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/05/start-business-bundle-kids-here/feed/19When you need a change of sceneryhttp://lauravanderkam.com/2014/04/change-scenery/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/04/change-scenery/#commentsSun, 06 Apr 2014 23:55:45 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=4512read more »]]>I work late roughly one night a week. When I do, I go to the library. The easiest option is just to go to my local branch, which is only half a mile away, though it’s fairly small, and it isn’t open until 9 every night. On the nights it’s not open, or if I’m looking to be around people other than the librarians, I go to a bigger branch that’s about 10 minutes away. There are options to sit in comfy chairs, or at tables, or deep in the stacks, or in the windows that look out on the street. When I take a break, there are more books to paw through than my local place. I have kind of pawed through most of my favorite spots in the Dewey decimal system in my local library.

I tend to go to the library, rather than a coffee shop, because coffee shops feature people talking. I have a hard time ignoring their conversations and just working. Not always. I wrote What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast in (irony alert!) a coffee shop at night. But I don’t do that regularly. I have the same problem on Amtrak, which is why I have to sit in the quiet car. However, if I’m meeting someone, I usually go to a coffee shop that is not Starbucks that’s on the main drag around here. I have nothing against Starbucks, but it is located perilously close to the Banana Republic and J. Crew. Since I have to walk past these stores to reach the parking lot, I sometimes slip in “just to take a look” and risk losing another half hour of my work day. To say nothing of the cash.

I tend to get a lot of work done in my car dealership’s waiting area, but I haven’t tried going there when I don’t need an oil change or inspection.

I have had some success in out-of-the-way diners. If they’re busy, you need to move along, but if you buy a reasonable amount of stuff and are there at non-peak hours (2 p.m., or maybe 4 a.m.) you might be OK.

I have holed myself up in a hotel room for a few days to crank things out. I also find it an intriguing idea to work in someone else’s house. One’s own house has all sorts of distractions. The most dangerous are the useful distractions, like taking an hour out to organize the basement. You are highly unlikely to organize someone else’s basement.

I’m making a list of remote places to work — beyond home, the coffee shop, and an official co-working type space.

Where have you done remote work successfully? Any other ideas for places I should include on this list?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2014/04/change-scenery/feed/27Variety is the spice of workhttp://lauravanderkam.com/2013/11/variety-spice-work/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2013/11/variety-spice-work/#commentsWed, 13 Nov 2013 02:48:07 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=4099read more »]]>Whenever people ask how to make a living as a writer, veterans in the field tend to offer this tip: specialize. You become known for a topic, which means that you have ready access to all publications covering that topic, and you also know who are the right sources and what’s the most current research. That means that each piece takes less time to write. Especially if you want to write books, making the case that you know a field, and have an audience, vastly helps with getting a contract.

I suppose I have followed this advice to a degree with my books. I enjoy writing about time management and productivity, and I also like the gateway these topics provide to broader issues, like careers, talent development, leadership, economics, and so forth. So I’ve written about them a lot.

However, given today’s to-do list, I realize that I just haven’t specialized that much. On the docket:

Edit my short book, for the Philanthropy Roundtable, on teacher quality

Interview the head of an audio book publishing company for a USA Today column

Interview Hank Shaw, of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook on hunting and eating wild game as part of a sustainable, locavore-type diet (that link goes to his “On Killing” essay — worth a read)

Interview Dan Clements, author of Escape 101, for a Fast Company piece on sabbaticals

Interview the head of a digital media agency on how outside-work passions make you more productive

Interview a few people from a major foundation focused on education on their principal training investments

Answer a few queries on time management speeches

Set up an interview with someone for Mosaic

Blog on my scattered professional interests

The truth is, I really like learning about new things. The time that adds to a project isn’t a downside. It’s fun. Writing about school lunches recently, I enjoyed learning that the St. Paul MN school district tries to introduce ethnic dishes from groups that live in the area; Hmong Beef Fried Rice worked, and Karen Coconut Chicken did not. Children do not like turmeric. I suppose I could have imagined that, but now I’ve had it confirmed. I enjoyed learning today that audio books used to be mostly abridged because it’s unwieldy to sell a 30-CD package (CDs can hold about 74 minutes of sound). But with digital downloads, all that’s behind us. You can make an audio book any length you want!

Other facts: The Specklebelly goose is nicknamed “the ribeye in the sky” because unlike most geese, it puts on fat. If you’re going to go for a Christmas goose, try that breed.

I might earn more or be able to work fewer hours if I specialized more. I might be able to write better, deeper pieces, too. But I also think that my longevity in this business depends on me being interested enough in what I write to want to write it. If I had to do the same thing every day, I’d go nuts.

How different is your work on a day-to-day basis?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2013/11/variety-spice-work/feed/11My business model — and my identityhttp://lauravanderkam.com/2013/09/business-model-identity/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2013/09/business-model-identity/#commentsMon, 23 Sep 2013 23:01:42 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=3898read more »]]>This is a completely naval gazing post. Then again, isn’t that what a blog is for?

I’ve been spending a bit of time over the last few months pondering my business model and my professional identity. In any business built on a personal brand — and writing fits that model — you hit a certain threshold point. What I am selling is myself: my ideas, my writing. But there’s only one me. I only have 168 hours in a week, and I cannot work for all of them.

There are obvious answers, like outsourcing administration and charging more. These are both good ideas. But there’s a limit on both. Some things I do are scalable. A book can sell lots of copies, but I can’t write more than one book a year, and to be honest, the number is probably lower than that. The article-writing part of my business is also inherently limited. I can top out a publication’s pay scale, but they’re not going to completely change their business model to hire me.

I interviewed several people (including frequent commenter @ARC!) for a Fast Company story that ran this week on scaling up Brand You — but some of the options for growth are not available to me, given the second part of the headline. What is my professional identity?

Am I a productivity guru? Or am I a journalist?

From time to time I am approached by marketing firms, or organizations themselves, who’d like to work together on projects. Productivity or time management fits with their brand positioning, and they’d like me to do spokesperson type work (often media interviews on their behalf). If I’m a productivity guru, that might be extremely helpful to building my brand. It gets my name out there. But if I’m a journalist, it’s not something I can do. I write for publications that cover these companies, and it’s possible I’d do so myself. A journalist cannot also be a corporate spokesperson.

I realize that this hard line, though, is less hard than I at first see it. After all, companies are more than welcome to hire me as a motivational speaker for their employees. Somehow that seems fine. And the publications that I write for accept ads from the companies they cover. Sometimes media outlets are even in the same corporate families as companies they cover.

So I’m not sure that there’s any particular intellectual rigor to any of these decisions. But my feeling is that I’m a journalist, and I’d like to continue acting as one. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t accepted any ads for this blog, and I don’t do affiliate sales either. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with other people making different decisions, but this is the one I’m most comfortable with now, given what I think of as my professional identity.

What suggestions do you have for someone like me to scale up her business?

]]>http://lauravanderkam.com/2013/09/business-model-identity/feed/12Building a successful career — is it possible without childcare?http://lauravanderkam.com/2013/09/building-successful-career-childcare/
http://lauravanderkam.com/2013/09/building-successful-career-childcare/#commentsWed, 04 Sep 2013 23:58:09 +0000http://lauravanderkam.com/?p=3813read more »]]>Laura’s note: This week, I’m answering some of my Frequently Asked Questions — questions that I often hear from readers. As I email my answers, I sometimes think, hey, that would make a reasonable blog post! So here we go. If you have a question to add to the series, please email me at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com.

Q. I’m thinking of starting a freelance/work-from-home business. Do you think you can have a successful career without regular childcare?

A. Well…maybe. If you have very young children — ages 3 and under — and your partner or another household member is not available to care for the children regularly, you will really struggle with doing any significant amount of work. Caring for young children is exhausting. Yes, you may technically be able to work during nap times and at night after they go to bed. You can get up early to work. You can certainly work on weekends if you have a partner who can care for them then. Many parents do this. But again, caring for young kids is exhausting, and you will need a lot of discipline to work during your hours “off” when all you want to do is drink a beer and read a magazine (at least that’s all I want to do on the days I am solely responsible for my kids!).

So if you have young children and want to make a serious go at starting a business, I’d turn the question around: why are you averse to childcare? Is it the cost? It is certainly difficult to pay for childcare when your business is not yet producing revenue, but many entrepreneurial ventures have start-up costs. You’re not building a factory, you’re just paying a babysitter, but it kind of goes in the same bucket. There may be ways to reduce costs, like trading off with a neighbor or friend, but then you’d need to know that your friend can be completely reliable in this situation. Because here’s the issue: it’s really hard to build a business if you don’t know, with 97% certainty, that if you schedule a client call at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, you’ll be able to take it with no one screaming in the same room. I’m not saying it can’t be done. Maybe your kids are much better sleepers than mine. Maybe all your clients love listening to screaming babies! I worked through the newborn phase with all three of my kids, and divided the world into People I Can Call With A Baby On My Lap and People I Cannot Call With a Baby On My Lap. But building a business is hard enough as it is. Doing it with one hand metaphorically tied behind your back is even harder.

Now, if your kids are in school regularly, this is a different matter. For some reason, people often consider preschool to be in a different category than daycare, even though they’re pretty much the same thing. I won’t bother going into this, but once your kids are 3 years old or so, it’s quite possible to put them in some sort of regular preschool program for 5 mornings a week. Some schools have afternoon hours, too.

At that point, you can start getting some pretty significant work time. Even more important, from the perspective of building a business, they’re regular work hours, so you’ll probably be able to plan for a 10 a.m. call. And once the kids are in official K-12 school, all kinds of time opens up. My 1st grader gets on the bus at 8:42 a.m., and gets home around 4 p.m. When all three kids have that schedule, that will be a bit over 36 hours per week available — more than the usual definition of full-time — for 9 months of the year. And that’s without having to resort to the usual tricks for finding more time (working early in the morning, after the kids go to bed, on weekends, etc.). If you do resort to those tricks, you can get yourself up over 40 hours pretty easily.

So yes, many people I know who freelance or have home-based businesses do fine with building their businesses once the kids are in school. It’s not perfect, of course. You have to arrange for summer care, so figure you’ll be paying for a lot of camps unless you can figure out a way to make your business hibernate during the summer. There are random half days and kids can get sick. If you have regular childcare arrangements, there’s a back-up for school — the person who takes care of your 2-year-old can also keep an eye on your 7-year-old if he’s home. If you will need to travel for your business, or go to evening events, you’ll have to figure something else out. But you will at least have a fair number of hours to work without the cash outlays associated with full-time childcare.

If you work at home, what kind of childcare arrangements do you have? How have these changed over the years?